The Bridesmaid's Daughter

by Nyna Giles

  Carolyn wore a strapless cocktail dress by Ceil Chapman, a New York designer she loved. Before leaving the Manhattan House, she and Grace had both pulled on short white evening gloves and grabbed small fur stoles to wear around their shoulders now that the weather was cooler. Together, they made the short ride down Broadway to Fiftieth Street. Grace was immaculate in her long gown, her golden hair swept into a chignon. In the past, it was Carolyn who had always known just what to wear, but with her career waning, her confidence was leaving her. She was wearing a shorter dress than Grace’s, and the only evening shoes she could find to match her dress were strappy sandals, which she knew weren’t exactly the right choice for the colder weather. Should she have worn a full-length gown? Different shoes?

  As they approached the theater that evening, a group of photographers spotted Grace and gathered around to capture a picture. It was only natural for Carolyn, as a model, to reflexively smile when she saw a camera lens pointing in her direction, so she stopped to pose.

  The following night, when Grace came up to the Reybolds’ apartment for dinner, as she often did when she was home in New York, she brought with her the photographs of the event that had appeared in the newspapers that day, including a picture of Carolyn and Grace as they turned to the photographers, with Malcolm and Cassini to one side. As Carolyn leaned over to look at the photos, she was certain she heard Grace mutter under her breath, “They take all the bows without making the pictures…”

  Carolyn was so rattled by the comment that she couldn’t bring herself to ask Grace to repeat it or explain what she’d meant. She felt Grace was sending her a message: that Carolyn should stop encroaching on Grace’s hard-earned spotlight. No other words were exchanged on the subject, but Carolyn couldn’t shake the feeling that she had failed her friend. She resolved to walk at least ten paces behind Grace whenever they were out together in the future.

  * * *

  THE EVENING OF March 30, 1955, Carolyn sat at home in her apartment at the Manhattan House, watching the Twenty-Seventh Academy Awards ceremony on television. It was only the third time that the awards had been televised—and for viewers like Carolyn, it was still hard to believe that the events on-screen were actually happening in real time somewhere on the other side of the country. Carolyn watched, riveted, as Grace sailed across the stage of the RKO Pantages Theatre, wearing long white opera gloves to her elbows with a little evening purse swinging in the crook of her arm. In the television’s black-and-white blur, Grace’s long satin gown looked silvery white, but Carolyn knew it was actually the palest blue. At the last minute before leaving for Hollywood, Grace had knocked on Carolyn’s door, asking to borrow a slip to wear under the dress. Carolyn had loaned her a silk one, in yellow, Grace’s favorite color, to bring her luck.

  After presenting the awards for Best Documentary Short and Best Documentary Feature, Grace returned to her seat in the theater and waited. Best Actress was among the final categories to be announced. Eventually William Holden—who had starred with Grace in The Country Girl—came out onstage to present the award. Audrey Hepburn, Dorothy Dandridge, Jane Wyman, and Judy Garland had all been nominated in the Best Actress category alongside Grace, with Garland as the favorite to win. But when Holden opened the envelope, it was Grace’s name he read from the card. Carolyn watched as Grace floated up the stairs of the RKO Theatre to claim her prize.

  Grace took the statue in her hands and spoke softly into the microphone.

  “The thrill of this moment,” she said, holding back tears, “keeps me from saying exactly what I really feel. I can only say thank you from the bottom of my heart to all who made this possible for me.”

  Carolyn remembered the girl she had met all those years ago in New York, in glasses and cardigans, who was so determined to be an actress. Grace had done it. She had achieved her dream. Carolyn was so proud of her friend.

  Later that month, when Grace returned to New York from her triumph in Hollywood, she no longer pulled up in her cab at East Sixty-sixth Street and the Manhattan House. Two months earlier, she had moved out of the building and into the new apartment she’d purchased for herself, in a grand old building on Fifth Avenue at Eightieth Street. Grace was a wealthy movie star now, and she needed a home that was more in keeping with the woman she had become. Unlike the Manhattan House, with its low ceilings and modest-sized rooms, the apartment on Fifth Avenue was vast and ostentatious, spanning the entire seventh floor of the building. The ceilings soared; the living room boasted wide views across the park and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Grace was now mistress of a domain that included four bedrooms, a dining room, a living room, and a library. Although her mother had chosen the drab furnishings at her Manhattan House apartment, Grace declined Mrs. Kelly’s help this time. Instead, she hired the society decorator George Stacey, and with Stacey’s help, she outfitted her new home with soft silk rugs and French antique furniture in shades of sky blue, ivory, and gold.

  For the first time since Carolyn and Grace moved to New York in 1947, they were no longer neighbors. Grace had only moved a mile away, but to Carolyn, the new apartment on Fifth Avenue seemed a universe away from their familiar corner of the Upper East Side in the Sixties. Since leaving the Barbizon, Carolyn had always followed in Grace’s footsteps, to Manhattan House, to premieres and parties, but now she recognized that her friend had crossed an invisible barrier beyond which Carolyn couldn’t trespass. Grace was famous, but Carolyn would never be. Carolyn’s face might appear in magazines, but no one knew her name. She didn’t have any lines or awards. She was a mute, a mannequin, a coat hanger, only a little more animated than the life-sized dolls that stood in the windows of the department stores.

  She knew her place.

  That January, Carolyn appeared in a Viceroy cigarette ad, and for the rest of 1955, her modeling jobs arrived steadily. It was no longer the rush of work she’d experienced during her early years, but she was back in the pages of Seventeen, Glamour, Mademoiselle, Charm, and Modern Bride. Malcolm was also faring better. He had recovered from his illness, and he had been offered a new job as associate director of marketing at the McCann Erickson advertising agency. The new job made Malcolm happy—and although Carolyn was relieved that the burden of supporting the family no longer fell exclusively to her, it was hard not to miss him when, in the evenings, she found herself alone at the Manhattan House, the children sleeping quietly in their rooms, waiting for her husband to come home from long evenings entertaining his clients.

  Twenty blocks north, Grace also found herself waiting—but for whom, she didn’t yet know. At the age of twenty-five, she was still single. The relationship with Oleg Cassini had stalled after her parents had intervened (Cassini, like Don Richardson before him, was a divorcé, and therefore considered unsuitable by Mr. and Mrs. Kelly). While Grace had been away making movies, it seemed, every one of her closest friends had gotten married and was having children. A woman of her times, she knew that she was in danger of being left on the shelf. Even the triumph of her Oscar win had been tempered by the knowledge that her time was running out. The night of the Academy Awards, Grace arrived back at her suite at the Bel-Air Hotel and lay down on her bed, her golden statuette beside her.

  “There we were,” she later recalled, “just the two of us. It was terrible. It was the loneliest moment of my life.”

  * * *

  IT WAS A few days after Christmas 1955, the same year as Grace’s Oscar win, when the telephone rang at Carolyn’s Manhattan House apartment.

  “I have something to tell you,” Grace said. “Meet me tomorrow.”

  Carolyn could tell right away that something had happened. Grace sounded jubilant and Carolyn immediately assumed that she had met someone. But nothing could have prepared Carolyn for what Grace told her the next day over lunch at her apartment on Fifth Avenue.

  “I’m marrying Prince Rainier!” Grace blurted.

  Carolyn had had no idea that her friend even had a new love interest; Grace had kept the entir
e romance a secret, even from her closest friends.

  Now Grace told Carolyn the full story. She had met the prince earlier in the year, while she was in Europe at the Cannes festival. Paris Match magazine had arranged a photo shoot with Rainier at his palace in Monaco, just along the coast. That day, the prince gave Grace a tour of the palace gardens. The two exchanged pleasantries, photographs were taken, and then Grace returned to Cannes and the prince to his duties. But the visit had marked the beginning of a secret correspondence between them that would last for the rest of the year. Grace returned to New York and went on with her life, preparing for her upcoming roles and publicizing those films she had already made. Each day, however, she checked the mailbox at her apartment on Fifth Avenue, to see if one of the prince’s letters might be waiting, unmistakably stamped with the official red-and-gold seal of the House of Monaco.

  As they wrote, Grace and her prince revealed more and more about each other, until it became clear they were in love. Although they had met in person on only a single occasion, Grace took Rainier to meet her parents in Philadelphia for Christmas. Here Rainier asked Jack Kelly for his daughter’s hand in marriage. Jack gave his consent. At last, Grace had found a man her parents couldn’t reject.

  If the engagement seemed at all hurried or impulsive, Carolyn felt she wasn’t one to judge. She had met and married Malcolm within six months of their first date; she understood Grace’s need to feel swept off her feet. That New Year’s Eve, Carolyn celebrated with Grace and the prince, along with Grace’s closest friends, at the Stork Club in New York, where Grace and Rainier danced, and everyone raised glasses and made champagne toasts to their future.

  The official engagement announcement appeared in the newspapers on January 5, 1956, and a lavish engagement party was held at the Waldorf Astoria later in the month. From the moment of the announcement, the American press wouldn’t leave Grace alone. She could no longer walk out of her apartment building without being mobbed by the crowds of photographers and reporters waiting outside. Every newspaper and magazine in the country ran daily updates about Grace, Hollywood’s princess, and her wedding plans. Cary Grant had given her a little black poodle, Oliver, as an engagement gift, but as she couldn’t walk the dog for fear of being hounded by reporters, Grace loaned him to Carolyn’s daughters, Jill and Robin—now four and two. Each morning, the girls went out, in their matching navy-blue coats with silver buttons, to walk Oliver in Central Park with their nanny.

  Before the end of January, Grace called Carolyn again, this time from Los Angeles, where she was shooting High Society, her final film before the wedding. She had more news. She wanted Carolyn to serve as one of her bridesmaids. Carolyn hadn’t wanted to assume that Grace would even be able to invite her to the wedding, let alone include her in the party, but on February 20, when the official announcement of the bridesmaids’ names was released to the press, Carolyn’s name was among them. Grace’s sister and four other friends, including Sally Parrish—now married and called Richardson—would make up the rest of the wedding party.

  From the moment of the bridesmaids’ announcement in February until early April, when it was time to leave for Monaco, Carolyn was so busy preparing for Grace’s wedding that she barely had time for a single modeling job. There were multiple dress fittings for the bridesmaids’ gowns, and hats and gloves to collect, wedding and shower gifts to buy, and press interviews and photo shoots to attend.

  Then there was the bridal shower to arrange, a task that fell to Carolyn and Sally Richardson. The date for the shower was set for the last weekend in March, just a few days before Grace’s departure for Monaco. The Saturday of the party, Grace arrived at Sally’s apartment on the Upper East Side swathed in a giant mink coat, wearing a pink pillbox hat decorated with drooping pink silk roses. Photographers were waiting, and Grace duly turned to the cameras, waved, and smiled before entering the building. The fifteen guests that afternoon included Grace’s mother, her sisters, and her sister-in-law, as well as her bridesmaids and Alfred Hitchcock’s wife, Alma Reville. Carolyn and Sally served champagne and slices of a cake decorated with tiny umbrellas. Later, Grace opened her gifts, which were piled below a large parasol that Sally and Carolyn had pinned with fresh flowers. Inside the boxes—with their elaborate wrappings and ribbons—were fine French lingerie sets, a pair of the softest white kid gloves, a large beach hat for afternoons on the French Riviera, white leather address books, a fancy belt, and a jeweled box for keeping tissues inside. Hitchcock himself had jokingly sent Grace the gift of a floral shower cap. “Something for your shower,” he wrote on the gift tag.

  Later that week, Carolyn visited Grace at the apartment on Fifth Avenue, where she was preparing to leave for Monaco. Strewn all around were clothes, shoes, purses, hats and gloves, books and letters, her Oscar statuette, seven years’ worth of accumulated possessions. Carolyn did her best to persuade Grace that now that she was going to be a princess, she probably wouldn’t need her sensible schoolmarm shoes and tweed skirts from her Barbizon days. But Grace was sentimental about clothing. Even if she was going to start a new life in Monaco, she wanted to keep something of the girl she’d been, a reminder of the past, to take with her into her glowing future.

  It was all happening at whirlwind speed. The following week, barely three months after her engagement, Grace left on the ship the SS Constitution, bound for Monaco and her prince. Carolyn would join her in Monte Carlo via airplane a week later, Malcolm at her side, the bridesmaid’s dress wrapped in layers of tissue paper in her luggage. More than anything Carolyn had wanted to go with Grace on the ship, but Malcolm had put his foot down. Between his job, their two children, and the cost, they couldn’t afford to be gone that long. Instead, he arranged for Carolyn to be interviewed about the wedding after she returned from Monaco on NBC’s Home TV show. In return NBC would pay for the airplane tickets. Fearfully, Carolyn had asked Grace if she minded. Now more than ever, Grace was nervous about her privacy and anxious about any betrayal on the part of her friends. Begrudgingly, Grace agreed to the interview, as long as Carolyn didn’t wear her bridesmaid’s dress. But Carolyn was still terrified that Malcolm had put her in a situation where she had displeased her friend.

  Sally Richardson and her husband, John, were also flying to France, and so the two couples flew together, with a connecting flight from Amsterdam. They arrived a little less than a week before the wedding. From the airport, they took the coastal road to Monaco, climbing through the steep and narrow streets of the town, stores shuttered in the afternoon sun, every building festooned with red and white banners emblazoned with the initials R and G—for Rainier and Grace. Then the car turned into Casino Square, where crowds of gray-hatted reporters and photographers were waiting.

  Carolyn had been to Europe only once, for a photoshoot for Mademoiselle in Paris, but even so, she had never seen anything quite as glamorous as Casino Square, its matching white stone buildings banked by palm trees and overlooking the ocean. Uniformed porters held out their arms to keep back the crowds as Carolyn, Malcolm, Sally, and John climbed out of their car and up the stone steps to the hotel’s lobby, gleaming with white marble floors and gilded mirrors on every wall. Upstairs in their room, a giant bouquet of peonies, roses, gladioli, and tuberoses was waiting with a card from the prince welcoming them to Monaco. Thick envelopes arrived inscribed with their names, each one with an invitation or set of tickets to wedding events planned for the week.

  First on the agenda was the dinner dance hosted by Grace’s parents at the next door Casino de Monte Carlo. The following night there was a white-tie gala at the International Sporting Club in Monte Carlo, with a special performance by the ballerina Tamara Toumanova. Monday was the wedding rehearsal at the Cathedral of St. Nicholas, with a dinner at the palace for the bridesmaids and husbands. And the day before the religious wedding at the cathedral, the civil ceremony was to take place at the palace, where Grace would become Rainier’s legal wife, followed by a garden party to which the entire
population of Monaco had been invited.

  * * *

  ON APRIL 19, 1956, Carolyn woke early in her room at the Hôtel de Paris in Monte Carlo. She walked over to the hotel windows, parting the thick swagged drapes and swinging open the long, tall windows so she could step out onto the hotel balcony. It was only dawn, and a pink light was creeping across the horizon and the Port Hercule, Monaco’s small harbor, with its neat rows of white yachts rocking in place. Beyond the harbor she could see Le Rocher—the rocky promontory on which the prince’s palace stood—jutting out into the vast dark Mediterranean. Even after a week in Monaco, the view still caused her to catch her breath, the morning light now revealing dusky-colored buildings clustered on the cliffsides surrounding the harbor and narrow roadways stretching up into peaked green hills. No wonder Grace had fallen in love, not only with her prince but with his country. Carolyn felt as if she could stay here forever.

  She stepped back into the room where Malcolm lay sleeping. She had work to do, her hair to fix, makeup to apply. In her seven years of modeling, there had been no role more important than that of Grace’s bridesmaid. The dress that Grace had picked out for her attendants to wear was hanging in the closet. Rather than the usual frilly outfits worn by bridesmaids, Grace had selected something modern and distinctive, made from the softest silk organdy in a pale yellow shade that the dressmakers dubbed “Sunlight.” It had a high pointed collar and five covered buttons down the front, a pleated sash at the waist, and full sleeves that ballooned out to midforearm. The taffeta skirts were so full that they billowed, the fabric at the back creating its own train.